


swing life away

by spikedpoppies



Category: Misfits (TV 2009)
Genre: Autism, Autistic Character, Bad Coping Skills, Emotionally Distant Parents, Established Relationship, Fluff, Food Industry, I cannot write, Love, M/M, Marijuana, Nathan is his own warning, No Incest, No graphic death, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Indulgent, Sibling Bonding, Soft Boys, Welsh Character, as someone who works in the food industry nathan would Totally fuckin work in the food industry, cute shit, he dies a couple times, just absolute wank, long tangents, maybe? - Freeform, mild poverty, no beta we die like men, simon bellamy is autistic, sort of depressing?, what is this, why is incest right next to sibling bonding?, written whilst impaired
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-02
Updated: 2019-05-02
Packaged: 2020-02-15 21:52:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18678052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spikedpoppies/pseuds/spikedpoppies
Summary: What if you never make it out of your hometown? What if you never make it big?Life at the so-called "rock bottom" by Simon Bellamy, ex-youth delinquent, current stoner.





	swing life away

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [All The Beauty Seen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7644979) by [spindlekiss](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spindlekiss/pseuds/spindlekiss). 



> Eliza Bellamy is totally mcsnatched from Spindlekiss' "All the beauty seen", another gr8 simon/nathan fic!! check it if u haven't already yet! 
> 
> Title is from Rise Against's "Swing Life Away", an excellent if slightly sad song.
> 
> This can also be read as a continuation of my other misfits fic, "it was a warm summer night when we premeditated our crime," so just keep that in mind bros! 
> 
> NOTE: I, myself, do not have autism or ASD, I have ADHD that presents itself similarly to/has a shit ton of overlap with autism spectrum disorders. Most of the stuff in here is written from my direct experience, and some is the experiences of similarly neuro-diverse friends. Not all of the stuff in here applies to every autistic person, and not everything that applies to an autistic person applies here. That being said, if you are autistic and I am fucking up severely, please PLEASE tell me and I will do my best to fix it. :D

“I think I might turning into a stoner.”  
They’re sitting on the roof, the inaugural Abso Five. Together, they have killed, stolen, been tortured, and done community service. It’s almost like a family now, a crime family, _goodfellas_ , Simon thinks. 

‘Course, he wouldn't really know. Mom and Dad are always gone, and when they’re around, Simon almost wishes that they weren't.   
They’re too clean, starched and bleached and pressed just like everything else in their house, and all he can feel is that he and Eliza are not the perfect, level-headed children they had wanted. 

He’s grateful for his sister, though. There are stories, alternate plotlines, either you can drift apart or the isolation can draw you closer. Magnetism, a 50/50 split between trauma bonding and withdrawing from human contact. _anti-social behaviour._ Funny. 

But Simon is grateful. Eliza had not always understood, especially when she was younger and he was already diagnosed. But she came closer than their parents, learning Simon instead of stereotypes and generalizations. 

She’d got that Simon could make eye contact, he just saved it for when it was really important to him. She’d understood that sometimes silence sat better in his throat than Welsh or English. He shook her hand after he walked her to school when she was younger instead of hugging her goodbye, but that was just Simon.

He didn't like hugs, but if he was lying down somewhere Eliza could just spread out on top of him and listen to his heartbeat for hours as he read a book or edited video, and he would just pick her up, still on his back, whenever he needed to go somewhere until she wanted to leave. 

Eliza, age thirteen, gave her brother the lighter she had snatched from Nathan’s pocket at his funeral. 

“Eliza,”  
“He won’t need it where he’s going. C’mon, you look fidgety.”

Simon stuck the lighter in his pocket, the chh-chh-chh of the spark wheel oddly comforting, the burnt sticky resin at the bottom corner with which Nathan used to pack achingly familiar.   
Simon is grateful she hadn't asked why he didn't cry, or why he felt the need to get off the bus early and walk the rest of the way home, even though it took him an extra hour and a half in the drizzling rain. 

Eliza might not be the perfect daughter, but she was a good sister. She was the black sheep up until Simon got arrested: sticky fingers and rumours followed her, and she was a whirlwind of messy hair, inattention, and elastic morals.   
But she had cued up some of Simon’s favourite films that week after the funeral, and hadn't asked questions when Simon came home with an alive Nathan, covered in soil and sweat and clinging to him for dear life. 

“I think I might be turning into a stoner,” Simon says again, after he realized no one had heard him. His tendency to go invisible unannounced was more noticeable when the group started hanging out more.  
Nathan would suddenly be asked how he was sitting like that, and he would look up to share a laugh with Barry, only to find he was leaning on nothing at all. 

But most of the time, before Nathan, before nights on the roof and in the community centre and outside, Simon would feel invisible in a different way. Hiding behind inacticulatable sentiment and misunderstandings, secluded as punishment without knowing his crime. 

But now, jokes are explained to him, even after the rest of them have to keep pausing to laugh as they choke out explanations.

Nathan is a cartoon character of emotion, easy to read simply because he’s written in all-caps like the dialogue for a silent film. Kelly projects the punchline of every joke into Simon’s brain for analysis, and Alisha will not hesitate to explain in extreme, rapturous detail about the ‘why’ of almost any topic. 

Curtis is still a bit difficult, storming away or disguising his reactions in minute facial expressions. He’s the only one of them who really had to be polite for long periods of time before, but it’s gotten to a point that when Simon makes his “puzzled fish face”, the nearest member of the group will flick the person who has last spoken, telling them to try again but plainer this time. 

They’re smoking weed on the roof, legs dangling off the edge, staring at the lake where they dumped Sally, or the spikes Nathan first died on. 

“So what?” 

Indifference, not cruel but factual. (Nathan would tell him if there was a hidden edge of cruelty along a word or phrase, watching out for conversational landmines like Simon’s seeing eye dog.)  
Like being a stoner isn’t something to be looked down upon, like that’s just how it is sometimes. 

And Simon suddenly realizes that they’re right.   
From when he was a little boy, his Mam had said he’d grow up to be special.   
But she had stopped when he couldn't make friends, when he couldn't talk for days at a time, when he’d ramble about developing film for thirty minutes uninterrupted. 

But she’d always had the unshakeable faith that he would ‘make something of himself’, that he would be the reward to her life of normalcy and night shifts and so-called unskilled labour. 

There seemed to be a point system in place, where if you landed enough riches from birth you wouldn't have to work to make yourself a success. Simon, as the first and only son of a poor Welsh woman, had to make success from nothing. He had instead sprouted a criminal record and high marks in history. 

Simon had a criminal record for public indecency and lewdness, trespassing, and disrupting the peace. He had buried bodies at the tender age of nineteen. Simon was on Pornhub, not using but in a video, and received a monthly cheque.

Simon was smoking with his hand on his boyfriend’s thigh, on top of the community center where they lived together for now, planning on moving into a flat with Kelly after she lost her fiance/boyfriend due to unfortunate mind-reading powers. 

So what if he was a stoner? So what if he lit up as soon as he woke up, shotgunning the smoke to Nathan as he woke up to the sound of Simon’s music playing gently?   
Simon wasn't going to be anything great. He’d accepted it. Not a superhero or a celebrity or even a famous director.

His name was in the credits of a couple of arthouse films around London, and he did union calls for film crews the rest of the time.   
It was okay if he took lazy pictures of Nathan stretching in the sunlight, hastily zoomed closeups of golden hipbones with high contrast shadows.   
For the first time ever, Simon was recording for himself, not for strangers. He didn't have his future to lose, there were no universities to impress, no resumes to lie on. For the first time in his life, Simon was truly free to live the life he wanted to. 

He took photos and films of beautiful things: the curl of a fern poking through the sidewalk, Kelly french exhaling around a cigarette, the snatch of Alisha’s collarbone framed by a golden hoop earring.  
Frozen feet by a box of cornettos. A coffin’s wooden lid splintered open and tossed aside. A silver cross, a silver medallion, and a small sheet of something with a smiley face, all resting Curtis’ tongue. Dexterous fingers rolling a blunt on a orange-clothed thigh. Flowers. 

A shot of Nathan in his tub, backlit as he shampooed his own brains out of his hair with a blunt firmly in the corner of his mouth. That was a video, not a photo, that night. Recorded on actual film, not an SD card, developed in an actual darkroom. Simon had needed real things then. 

Shaky, handheld pans as Simon focussed on Nathan: his tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth, soap bubbles popping and dissolving in his chest hair, the ridges between his eyebrows, his chapped lips as they mouthed around the obstruction to the fine tunes of Jelly Roll Morton. 

Nathan would watch this footage later, as Barry sent it to him with no caption. The faded music in the background would transition into something more solid, the one continuous shot growing more saturated and crisp and real as the film went on. 

Nathan is learning to speak Simon’s language, even if it takes him a long time and his pronunciation is just terrible. He’s learned to whisper the codes of ‘joking’ and ‘serious’ into Simon’s ear, he turns and translates slang and sarcasm like he’s getting paid. 

Nathan learns that videos are confessions of love, things Simon would be too uncertain to say aloud laid out in shallow depths of field and golden lighting and artsy nudes only Nathan is allowed to see.

Nathan takes the solid, unwavering eye contact Simon gives him that night as a gift, and almost doesn't hear the solidly and determinedly said “I love you” Simon declares, a statement, he’s too lost in icy blue irises and quiet intensity. 

Nathan repeats it back, day in and day out, even though Barry only said it once.   
Simon only said the three fateful words once. He made sure to say it right the first time, so that Nathan’s memory of it is absolutely perfect.

He shows it every day. Holding hands as they pass graveyards or someplace high up, stocking the beer with light lager even though he can’t stand the stuff, smoothing Nathan’s hair until he shakes out of his nightmares about dying over and over again from oxygen loss six feet under. Bites on the insides of Nathan’s thighs and up his neck, deep purple focussing on the spot just under his ear that makes him shiver if the wind hits it a certain way. Oranges and grapes and other such perishable foodstuffs left in a small, neat pile at the end of Nathan’s makeshift cot. 

Nathan peppers the words in throughout the day. At the end of a whisper, as Barry fixes his collar, calling it out as Simon pretends not to be affiliated with him during community service. Every time, Simon looks at Nathan’s face, and his cartoon-character features spell out the same message for Simon every time-- _happy-truthful-sincere._

Sometimes, people would cough out “I love you”s in movies, and Simon would have to pause and get Nathan or Eliza to explain why they said that when their face didn't mean it. 

Simon wasn't naive, far from it, but “I love you” was a phrase that had to be delivered with complete sincerity. And even though Nathan said it in many different tones, at inopportune times, he always told the truth. There was never a “but” or “in spite of” to Nathan’s “I love you”s. 

And now they are stoners together. Nearly constantly high, bloodshot eyes and dry mouths locking with each others. Simon works contract on TV shows and short films, and Nathan is one of the thousands of tattooed, cursing, loudmouth chefs behind every fancy kitchen: he yells sexual innuendo during the dinner rush, frantically stirring bechamel before the plates for table 15 leave. They don’t need to be terribly sober. 

Neither of them will go down in history, The Invisible and The Immortal live average lives though they are most definitely not average people. 

But as Simon remembers back to his Mother, saying something important about living up to his full potential--

And being patted on the back for the shot he suggested as the rough cut is shown to the film crew--

And every school-counsellor saying he can’t do anything of importance, of meaning, without university--

And Nathan giggling as he blows out a plume of smoke--

And a loop of various faces, various times- _you can’t really make money like that_ \--

Simon thinks that average is not that bad.   
He thinks that he and Nathan will never be able to own a house, or adopt a kid. He doesn't think he’ll ever be a famous director.   
Simon thinks that he and Nathan will probably live with Kelly for a good long time, because three incomes is so, so much better than two.   
He’ll get high on the weekends and he won’t be somebody. 

But Simon wasn't born to “be somebody.”

As he strokes Nathan’s hair and stares off over the lake, embracing being a stoner, embracing being poor, embracing the life he lives, he thinks that maybe he doesn't have a purpose. He thinks that maybe he is here just to be here. 

He doesn't find himself disquieted with the thought. 

Simon says “I think I might turning into a stoner.” for the third and final time that evening.   
He accepts the blunt from Kelly’s hand, plucking it from her long red-orange acrylics with shaky hands.

He whispers “Rwy'n dy garu di” into Nathan’s mouth on his smokey exhales, the words perfectly sincere every time.

**Author's Note:**

> leave comments or kudos pls! I know this didn't have much of a plot or was even written well, but I am desperate for validation lmao
> 
> Simon is autistic, welsh, and short and y'all can come for me.   
> Nathan is soft to his boyfriend and a sub. I'm right and I should say it.
> 
> hmu w misfits ideas!!


End file.
